Environmental groups have signed an open letter urging the French government to rule out permission to convert the Cordemais power station or any other coal plant to biomass.
In the letter to the French environment minister, the 46 signatories across 19 countries have also requested that the country’s four coal-fired power stations are shut down no later than 2021.
The signatories include Friends of the Earth International, the Global Forest Coalition, and organisations from three of the world’s largest wood pellet producing countries.
The groups warn that EDF’s biomass conversion proposals are not compatible with the French government’s commitment to meet the goal of the Paris Climate Agreement, which is to keep global warming to within 1.5 degrees.
EDF proposes to convert Cordemais power station to burning mostly wood pellets alongside coal, which runs counter to the government’s previous announcement to end all coal burning by the end of 2021, according to the signatories of the open letter.
The document is being published ahead of a report by the French grid operator RTE into energy security across western France.
Katja Garson from Fern, one of the groups that initiated the open letter, said: “To convert Cordemais power station to biomass, EDF will almost certainly have to import large quantities of wood pellets from regions such as the southern US, where pellet companies are sourcing from the clearcutting of highly biodiverse coastal hardwood forests and from forest conversion to sterile monoculture tree plantations – or from countries such as Estonia, where forests are being cleared much faster than they can regrow, causing irreversible losses to wildlife and reducing communities’ quality of life.”
The open letter points out that the concept that burning forest biomass is inherently carbon neutral or low carbon has been debunked by hundreds of scientists.
The signatories believe that energy security concerns must be addressed through greater investments in energy efficiency, as well as in wind and solar power, not by locking France into more years of high-carbon electricity generation.
In the open letter they emphasise that voiding the worst impacts of climate change requires rapidly phasing out fossil fuel burning without resorting to other high-carbon, polluting forms of energy, such as electricity from forest biomass.
EDF proposed to burn a special type of pellets made from waste wood in Cordemais and possibly Le Havre, which UK/US non-governmental organisation Biofuelwatch has questioned in a report.
The report’s author Almuth Ernsting said: “EDF is speaking about producing steam-exploded pellets to burn in Cordemais.
“Such pellets have so far been burned in just one coal power station worldwide, in Canada, where they caused rapid corrosion, which could have put workers’ safety at serious risk of explosion had the plant not be shut down in time.
“EDF must know that this cannot work and that they would have to resort to normal pellets made from virgin wood.”